m-Health

PR from Alcatel-Lucent:
 

The Auckland District Health Board (ADHB), Gen-i (a member of the Telecom New Zealand Group) and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) have joined efforts to launch New Zealand’s first trial of a healthcare remote patient monitoring (RPM) solution using mobile technology to monitor and manage chronic illness in the home. The three-month trial focuses on 20 heart disease patients selected by Auckland Hospital.

CTRU and NIHI at the University of Auckland are holding an m-Health conference on the 6th November. We have a great line up of local and international speakers so it will be a very exciting event.
 
If you haven't registered yet, please do so on the conference website asap to confirm your place:
 
https://www.m-healthconference.org.nz/registration.html
 

Priyesh started off with stating that more than half the world’s populations do not even have access to basic healthcare let alone the latest technology. The private sector in India is relatively well funded and many urban areas have world class healthcare facilities. However, approximately 70% of the population live in the ‘hinterlands’ where they are at the highest exposure to health risk. 42% of the population earns less than $1.25 per day.

David Dembo kicked off the afternoon session at the m-Health workshop. David talked about ‘Data Liquidity’ which is about being able to access your data on multiple devices in different environments. He showed a smartphone device connected to an ultrasound probe to act as a very portable ultra-sound machine. He showed a video of the Palm Treo being used by the Royal Nursing Service in Australia. Next, he described a smartphone based video-conference solution for wound management.

Dave Parry was next up in the m-Health workshop and his talk was on the use of RFID tags in medicine. RFID tags were first introduced in World War II! RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification. They are very low power and do not need a line of sight in the same way as a bar code.

 Robyn talked about her work at the Clinical Trials Research Unit at the University of Auckland. She highlighted some of the functions of mobile phones that fit well with the theories of behaviour change in public health.

Craig began his presentation with an overview of the latest trends in mobile technology including the fact that Vodafone is adding 2.5 million new subscriptions a months. In NZ there is now more than 100% mobile phone subscription penetration.
 
NZ is unique in that 3G has 97% coverage through Vodafone and Telecom. Higher speed mobile data such as HSDPA networks are now competing with DSL broadband. This has the potential to greatly increase the use of productivity applications.
 

The deadline for abstracts for the m-Health conference has been extended until Friday 4th September:

https://www.m-healthconference.org.nz/